You’ll need to uninstall the previous version if you’ve already got it installed, as the installer won’t perform an upgrade (at this time, I also uninstalled Visual Studio 2010, as I only had that version installed for MP Authoring, everything else I’m doing has since moved on to more recent versions of VS).

Some of the notable changes are (in no particular order):

Support for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013

Language packs other than ENU are now built correctly,

Picker dialog boxes now traverse Project references properly, as does the Find All references tool.

No more access denied error messages when trying to build a 2012 MP that has been auto deployed to a management group.

Import wizard can now resolve MP references inside MP bundles

Snippet Editor no longer displays duplicate columns when an ID has been used multiple times in the snippet template.

Monitor templates now set Auto resolve to “True” by default and Severity to “MatchMonitorHealth”

MP Context Parameter replacements can now be used in Module parameters that have non-string data types.

MP Simulator can now simulate Agent Task workflows

MPBA “Resolve” option now works correctly with generated fragment files

They’ve also changed the Project templates to make it a bit more explicit which versions of Operations Manager each project type supports, and added 2012 SP1 and 2012 R2 explicitly as new project types. Sadly still no xml templates provided for datasource, monitortype, probe or condition detection modules.

I should clarify I don’t mean template group support should be included (though based on the way some existing workflows are implemented, this could be done). I’d just like to see the skeleton XML fragments available as you already do for Classes, Linked reports, Diagnostics & recoveries as an mpx file. Not having to define the TypeDefinitions section, module structure and language pack elements every time and just updating a couple of XML elements and then filling in your desired membermodules would be a great help.

I’ve already filled this gap myself by creating Visual Studio Code snippets (which I’ll share on this blog in the coming week) but I think a code fragment template would help a lot of beginners and old hands who are new with VSAE get to grips with authoring composite workflows.

Jonathansaid

I’ll be looking forward to seeing more fragments out there. I started building some on the scomskills blog, but just haven’t had time. If I had some collaborators, I would be willing to help build out some type of fragment library on the https://projects.scomskills.com site. Hint-hint…Matthew, Tyson 😉

Agreed, the library I’ve been building up focuses mostly on code that you don’t use within a template group (since intellisense functions fine there, and the common modules are pretty well documented at this point). So far my snippet library contains context parameters, configuration blocks for common modules (Expression Filters, script modules etc), and modules that you are typically using in 80% of the custom workflows you create. Once I’ve made sure everything in it is bug free, I intend to release it for others to import into their VS and also get the benefit without having to leave the IDE to go lookup definitions.

That’s a nice body of work you’ve got over at scomskills 🙂 You should make sure that it’s linked to from the MP Authoring TechNet Wiki; that would help a lot of folks start using fragments properly (in addition to making Brian Wren quite happy!). Anything that helps people get to grips with MP XML is always a good thing 🙂